The Future of Fly Fishing Is Female

Whether she was real or a legend, the figure of Dame Juliana Berners, a 15th-century English prioress credited with penning the sport’s oldest instructional text, “The Treatise of Fishing with an Angle,” has long been the patron saint of women on the water. Five centuries later, the tide she helped set in motion is cresting. According to the Recreational Boating and Fishing Foundation’s 2025 Special Report on Fishing, 19 percent of first-time fly fishing participants in 2024 were women, outpacing men by 3 percent. In general, the South leads the charge, accounting for 44 percent of all female fishing participants, the highest of any region in the country.

In Charleston, a thriving female fly fishing community has found its footing through three initiatives: Lady Fly Club’s monthly fly-tying nights, Golden Hour’s annual workshop, and Marsh Wear’s Lady Red Rendezvous tournament.

Lady Fly Club

Sage Holaway grew up in Captiva Island, Florida, the daughter of Captain Brian Holaway, a licensed USCG captain and certified Florida Master Naturalist who instilled in her an early reverence for nature.

“Saltwater fly fishing is very spread out, and there’s not one thing that brings us all together physically besides tournaments,” Holaway says. “We’d constantly run into each other, saying, ‘I can’t wait for Lady Red.’ The community was already here. It just needed a home.”

In March 2025, she founded the Lady Fly Club and hosted its first fly-tying night at Fin to Feather in Mount Pleasant, featuring an art giveaway from Bryn Roff, a local female artist and angler who painted the club’s logo, two contrasting fly patterns, a purple-and-black local scheme paired with a yellow-and-white shrimp pattern, designed to reflect the duality that all female anglers hold. “I set a strict rule of only working with women in every aspect of what I’m building,” Holaway says.

Holaway told the fly shop to expect maybe 20 women. Forty showed up, three rows deep, leaning in to watch fly patterns take shape. Night two in April, held at 843 Flies in West Ashley and led by Captain Kelsey Dick, gathered 52 women. Proceeds from the first night went to Fish for Change, raising $500 to fund fly fishing trips for young girls in Costa Rica and Norway.

Dick, founder of The Beardless Fisher Inshore Charters and digital marketing manager at Shimano, came to saltwater fly fishing after stints as a professional ballet dancer, a biologist on the Great Lakes, and a fisheries researcher at Duke Marine Lab. A job with the South Atlantic Fishery Management Council brought her to Charleston. Her tagline says it all: a girl, a griff, and a saltwater skiff. Darwin, the wirehaired pointing griffon who earned that middle billing, passed away. Finch now holds the title, born a bird dog and trained to point tailing reds in the grass.

“Sometimes I like being the worst caster on the boat,” she says. “Casting is one of those things, like a golf swing, where you’re never really a master at it.” She has spent her career watching the sport exclude women. While fishing is behind, fly fishing sits at the forefront of inclusivity.

Dick argues fly tying is one of the sport’s most effective welcome mats. “The sport has so many elements that it can be really intimidating. I don’t think there are a lot of sports where you can do arts and crafts, and then take your craft out and use it,” she says. “It’s like dipping your toe into the pool instead of trying to cannonball in.”

At Lady Fly Club’s April event at 843 Flies, Dick arrived to find the shop’s male staff wearing wigs so beginners could easily flag them down for help. She brought worksheets covering fundamentals: keep your line tight, always wrap away from you, never cut natural material, because she knew many in the room were encountering the craft for the first time.

Lady Fly Club hosts rotating fly-tying nights monthly, alternating between Haddrell’s and 843 Flies. Their last event, a casting instruction session, was June 17 at Hampton Park downtown. The club is always in search of girls who double haul, a mark of a skilled, serious caster who generates extra line speed and distance with an advanced two-handed technique. Lady Fly Club intends to mint more of them. “I’m not creating a community out of thin air,” Holaway says. “I’m giving it the accessibility and the tools to take their hobby and their passion where they want to go with it.”

Golden Hour

Caroline Irwin came to inshore fly fishing the way most converts do, through proximity to someone who loves it. She moved to Charleston in 2012 and met Captain John Irwin, now her husband. “He has the most beautiful cast I’ve ever seen,” she says. “Something just clicked in me, and I fell in love with it.”

She noticed a gap. Women were showing up to his casting clinics, eager and under-equipped. “So many women have access to fishing gear they don’t know how to use,” Irwin says. “Let’s change that.”

In September 2023, she launched Golden Hour, a fly-fishing workshop with a social gathering, food and wine, and expert instruction over an unhurried afternoon, making a technical sport feel like an invitation. Now in its fourth year, Golden Hour has refined its format. The 2026 event, planned for late August, will run as a full day, with participants grouped by skill level from the start. Casting instruction begins upon arrival, followed by open fishing time, a fly-tying station for those still finding their footing, and the signature social gathering anchored by Chef Todd Hadley and his wife, Karon, a local private chef team who prepare shrimp and grits and Lowcountry favorites, harvesting local ingredients.

Conservation runs through the event’s DNA. Golden Hour benefits Charleston Waterkeeper as its primary recipient, a natural alignment for Irwin, who serves on the organization’s board of directors. The Lowcountry Land Trust has become a secondary beneficiary, especially meaningful since last year’s event was hosted on a protected Land Trust property. “We want to learn how to take care of our water and our land,” Irwin says. “We borrow our water from the next generation. We need to advocate for conservation.”

Golden Hour’s partnership with Marsh Wear’s Lady Red Rendezvous gave the event a new narrative arc. Irwin strategically moved the workshop to precede the September tournament, giving participants a clear progression: learn the cast, practice through the season, and enter the tournament. Irwin covers a checklist of casting fundamentals, but the real catch is confidence. “The most important piece is that they walk away knowing they are capable of anything,” she says.

Lady Red Rendezvous

Marsh Wear’s Lady Red Rendezvous began in 2023 as the natural complement to the brand’s Holy City Tarpon Tournament, a beloved event that, as Julia Parrish, Marsh Wear’s marketing manager, puts it, was “naturally male-dominated.” The first Lady Red capped teams at 40 and sold out in 48 hours. Now, women travel from Montana, Colorado, Texas, and across Florida to fish Charleston’s spartina-lined creeks and tidal flats for two days every September.

The 2026 tournament, September 24-26, opens with a Captain’s Meeting on Thursday, continues with a Friday happy hour at Marsh Wear’s King Street flagship, and closes Saturday night with an awards party and live music. Teams of up to two female anglers, with a male guide permitted, fish fly-only, catch-and-release, launching from Charleston County boat ramps. Scoring is based on the combined length of each team’s three largest redfish. A bonus all-women’s boat category celebrates teams comprised of female anglers and guides.

“For a lot of women, Lady Red provides some validation that women belong in these spaces too,” Parrish says. “Lady Red creates an opportunity for women to show up confidently, whether it’s their first time holding a fly rod or if they’ve been fishing their entire lives.”

Dick, who fishes the tournament, describes the atmosphere on the dock at day’s end. “When you come back from fishing all day, it’s not who’s in first,” she says. “Whether you caught your first redfish or your biggest one, everyone’s just excited to hear about it.”

The decision to permit male guides is intentional. Female captains and guides remain relatively few in the Lowcountry, and restricting the field narrows access, but permitting male guides also supports the local guides who make their living on these waters. “When women see other women leading on the water,” Parrish says, “It helps break down barriers and inspires newer anglers to step into those roles themselves.” At its core, Lady Red is about visibility, showing there’s a place for women in competitive angling, guiding, conservation, and the outdoor industry as a whole.

For the fourth consecutive year, the tournament benefits Charleston Waterkeeper, contributing an average of $8,000 annually through raffles, sponsorships, and merchandise sales. Marsh Wear’s women’s line, launched alongside the first Lady Red in 2023, has grown to account for 17 percent of online orders and is projected to reach 20 percent of total sales by 2027, developed by an all-female design team.

“I think women have always been there,” Dick says. “I just don’t think there’s been a unifier, something for us to get together around.” Holaway is already thinking about what comes next: more female guides with a platform and all-women’s tournaments. “There is something very feminine about slowing down and going analog,” she adds. “It’s less competitive than any other style of fishing. It’s more about connection and nature.”

Fly casting, after all, is about finesse and timing, not brute strength. Women, it turns out, are built for it. In a world that rarely slows down, fly fishing offers a reason to unplug, a connection to Mother Nature’s rhythms, and the profound reminder that you are part of something much larger than yourself.

Lady Fly Club hosts monthly fly-tying nights at rotating Lowcountry fly shops. Follow along at @ladyflyclub.

Golden Hour is planned for late August 2026; visit goldenhourflyfishing.com for updates.

The Lady Red Rendezvous takes place on September 24-26, 2026; registration and details are available at marshwearclothing.com/pages/lady-red-rendezvous.